Robert Modrzejewski sometimes still smells the sickly sweet scent of decomposing bodies in the humid Vietnamese jungle.

Jack Lyon meditates every day and has made a fraught peace with his experience fighting the Viet Cong.

And Bill Rider, just 22 years old at the Battle of Khe Sanh, doesn’t attend Veterans Day parades. He believes that the real heroes never made it home.

America is just embarking on a period of 50-year anniversaries of the Vietnam War, which crept onto the nation’s radar in the late 1950s and led to a U.S. troop strength of 16,000 by 1963.

At the war’s height in 1968, more than 500,000 American troops were fighting in Southeast Asia.

The conflict left 58,253 U.S. troops dead and more than 153,300 wounded between 1955 and 1975. At least 1,698 American prisoners of war are still unaccounted for.

The war also split the nation, as many Americans felt that the United States had no place in a war in Southeast Asia.

Returning combat veterans were sometimes the focus of that protest. Events such as the 1968 My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. Army soldiers did not help public opinion.

Many Vietnam veterans still clasp their war experience very close.

“Hardly a day goes by I don’t think about the Marines and Navy corpsmen that I had that I lost in Vietnam,” said Modrzejewski, a former Marine company commander who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his role in the 1966 Battle of Hastings.

Bill Rider who served as a young Sgt. in the the Marines, holds just a few of his medals that he received from combat actions while in Vietnam.
— Nelvin C. Cepeda

Bill Rider who served as a young Sgt. in the the Marines, holds just a few of his medals that he received from combat actions while in Vietnam.
— Nelvin C. Cepeda

But the prism of 50 years has also altered the outlook of some warriors.

Rider had an older brother in the Marines. And when he signed up at age 19, he believed in the cause. Now he sees it very differently.

“I think we were wrong. I think the Vietnamese were not Communists. They were nationalists,” said Rider, who is co-founder of the nonprofit American Combat Veterans of War in Oceanside.

“(North Vietnamese leader) Ho Chi Minh thought we were going to extend the policy of the French colonization, and we were trying to win back Vietnam for the French. There were a lot of rubber plantations there. Rubber at that point was key. … So the military industrial complex helped with that.”

The 2008 Defense Authorization Act established a program to mark the 50th anniversaries of the Vietnam conflict.

In San Diego, Monday’s Veterans Day parade will honor those who served in that war. The grand marshals will be two of San Diego County’s three living Vietnam Medal of Honor recipients, John Baca and Jay Vargas.

Robert Modrzejewski

Modrzejewski is the other. At age 79, he now lives in Tierrasanta, enjoying retirement after 30 years as a Marine officer.

When he thinks back on Vietnam, he remembers some of the horrors.

“You always heard at night the dragging away of bodies. If you were killing X number of the enemy, you could hear during the evening, the bodies being dragged away by the North Vietnamese,” the retired colonel said.

In July 1966, Modrzejewski led his 130-person company through a 2½-day battle where they were desperately outnumbered.

He is credited with crawling 200 yards to resupply his men in the middle of the fight and marshaling them, despite his own wounds, to finally repulse the attack.

When he returned home, his Medal of Honor opened the door to White House visits and led to public interest in his story. He has never suffered the nightmares that plague many combat veterans.

“I think in my case, when I went to Vietnam, I was older. I was in my early 30s, and I was a captain. I’d been in the Marine Corps eight or nine years already,” Modrzejewski said.

“I think it’s a little bit different for someone who is 17 years old, and their parents signed for them to come into the Marine Corps, or 18 or 19. Thrust into that environment, they may have more difficulty adjusting to that.”

Vietnam vet, Jack Lyon volunteered and served in Vietnam as Marine Platoon commander in the infantry, where he was awarded the Silver Star medal for his actions.
— Nelvin C. Cepeda

Vietnam vet, Jack Lyon volunteered and served in Vietnam as Marine Platoon commander in the infantry, where he was awarded the Silver Star medal for his actions.
— Nelvin C. Cepeda

Jack Lyon

The story was much different for Jack Lyon. But the 73-year-old has found the good in his Vietnam experience — finally.

He spent 12 years, from 1967 to 1979, in a deep drugs-and-alcohol dive following two tours in Vietnam.

He can still describe the minute details of the battle for which he received the Silver Star.

He was a first lieutenant in 1965 when his Marines were dropped into a hot zone. Eleven of 87 guys were still functioning after the Viet Cong ripped into the rice paddy where the Americans landed.

As the night went on, the corpsmen ran out of morphine.

“We lost kids of their wounds. The noise that people make when they are dying, when they are young and healthy — it’s really something. It was distressing to the other kids who are out and about. So I hung out with those kids and helped them check out of the net.”

What he means is, he held them while they died.

“The problem with war is that it’s beyond the mind. What happens in war, you get in this juxtaposition between life and death, and it’s beyond your mind’s ability to comprehend. It’s so real. You are actually touching the third rail of life,” Lyon said.

“When I came home, my relationships had been reordered. I didn’t understand it at the time. … It’s so disorienting. It’s so real. The veil of illusion is ripped off your eyes.

“At that time, I thought that the whole purpose was to have as much fun as possible. And fun became a lot of work. I ended up in not a good place mentally. They diagnosed me as suicidal and clinically depressed.”

Even though he was successful in business during that period, he now knows that he was running away from responsibility.

“I’d lost a lot of kids, and I hadn’t figured out how to integrate that,” he said.

Almost as therapy for himself, he was one of five founders and the initial chairman and president of Vietnam Veterans of San Diego in 1981. Now called Veterans Village of San Diego, the nonprofit group offers residential treatment for veterans with drug and alcohol problems and those living on the streets.

In 2004, as the American military position in Iraq began to unravel, Lyon began volunteering at the Navy hospital in Balboa Park. He still does peer-to-peer counseling for wounded combat veterans here.

“What we wanted to do is shrink the amount of time (required for recovery). For me, it was 12 years. If we can make it one year for these kids, or six months, or one month. Think of all the life that they have given to them that they don’t need to piss away,” the Kensington resident said.

Looking back at the entire Vietnam experience, he likes to focus on the grace he sees in the behavior of the young Marines, then and now.

“The purity of the accountability and responsibility of these young kids — they have lived at a really young age, just like we did.”

He also sees what he got out of the military.

“You learn how to make a decision. You learn how to take a punch. You learn how to get back up and make another decision and go forward.”

He ended up running the pension division of Dun & Bradstreet. Looking at his management team there, he marveled at how they hesitated when facing a choice.

“I said, ‘C’mon people, what’s the problem?’ It’s not raining. Nobody’s shooting at us. Just make a decision.”

Fifty years later, he has found some small peace about the politics surrounding the conflict.

“I was really hurt when I watched those tanks roll into Saigon. And I thought about my guys. What the hell did they die for? What the hell was the point of it?”

Seeing Vietnam prosper economically makes him somewhat happy.

He is still angry when he thinks about his translator and other South Vietnamese whom he befriended. They were undoubtedly killed when the United States pulled out and North Vietnam rolled through the South.

“But I’ve come to understand that life, the river, keeps flowing,” Lyon said. “For me, personally, the mind either lives in the past or in the future. But life is right now. That’s what I focus on.”

Bill Rider

Can we love something that hurt us deeply? Bill Rider can.

As a 22-year-old Marine sergeant, the Ohio farm kid fought in the Battle of Khe Sanh.

It was a 2½-month siege by the North Vietnamese army on an American base braced between the two halves of Vietnam.

Even though his 12½ months in Vietnam in 1968 meant losing many, many friends — sometimes even as he carried them to safety — he would do it again.

“It was a rush. Here’s a young man with a weapon in his hand, the power of life and death over humanity, and you are creating history. Positive history, we thought,” said Rider, 68, of Carlsbad.

“And defending and believing in institutions and a country, the United States and the United States Marine Corps. And embracing your brothers — that bond, it’s the strongest bond in the world.”

Still, it cost him dearly. After returning home at 130 pounds, thanks to malaria and dysentery, Rider chose not to re-enlist. It would have meant another tour, and he figured he’d used up all his luck surviving three combat injuries.

So he was home with a Purple Heart from a conflict that Americans didn’t respect. He wouldn’t understand his own post-traumatic stress symptoms for years.

“For a long time, I had a hard time being judged by people who had no idea of the substance of combat veterans, or what they did,” he said. “While I believe they were right to do what they did — because they certainly shortened the war. But they confused the warrior with the war. They had no idea what we were suffering.”

It makes him profoundly sad that he believes the war wasn’t justified, knowing how many people died in Vietnam. As far as he is concerned, the tally continues to mount as more Vietnam veterans commit suicide and die from illnesses linked to Agent Orange exposure during war.

His own son, 36, has Tourette’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive symptoms.

Rider believes it is connected to Agent Orange, the “tactical herbicide” used by the United States in Vietnam to remove dense tropical foliage where the enemy hid. The toxic pollutant dioxin was an unwanted byproduct of herbicide production.

In 2001, before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Rider and another Vietnam veteran launched American Combat Veterans of War.

It was aimed at World War II, Korea and Vietnam veterans. But when combat survivors forged in Afghanistan and Iraq began streaming out of Camp Pendleton, they gave Rider a renewed mission.

Rider sees the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans being mostly hailed as “heroes.”

While that goes against his own belief about Vietnam — that the real heroes never made it home — he thinks it is beneficial for the psyche of young fighters.

“They’ve had their share of plaudits, and that’s a good thing. That has put them in the frame of mind that they can somewhat accept the trauma they were involved in,” Rider said.

“I can’t accept the trauma that I was involved in because everyone told me, and the other Vietnam veterans, what heels we were. What crazy people we were,” he said.

“And that’s why still in the Golden Triangle (of Northern California) there are lots of Vietnam veterans, in Mexico probably 20,000 expatriate veterans down there. They have just cut out and feel this country has nothing to offer them.”

Almost 50 years later, the good and the bad, for Rider?

“The good things are that I found myself, my potential. I know my limitations, but I know what I can do. Before I went to Vietnam, I was very unsure of who I was. But I know that given any circumstance I’m as good as anyone, if not better.”

Even to this day, he said, “The bad part is dealing with the images at night.”